Leon Underwood
Icelandic Fishermen and Women - 1923
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Oil on canvas
Signed and dated
61 x 51 cm (inches: 24 x 20.)
Extract from Leon Underwood by Christopher Neve (Thames & Hudson, London, 1974), pp 72-74:
"The relevance of the journey to Iceland in Underwood's work stems from a slightly different source from the one he had anticipated. He went there expecting to study indigenous art, which he thought would be simple and direct carvings, like Denbigh and Dorset-culture Eskimo art, stemming from a culture adapted to a treeless region dependent on hunting and fishing. Instead, what painting and carving he saw was a feeble imitation of Post-Impressionism with no proper basis in the Icelandic way of life, and he found that the best course for him to take was to investigate, not so much their art, as the people themselves. The effect was that he began to paint less literally and to look increasingly for symbolic equivalents to express the humanity of his subject. The plum skies of the edge of the Arctic Circle got into his palette, and he began to paint an idyll.
He left for Iceland, taking Blair Hughes-Stanton and Rodney Thomas with him, in July 1923. They landed at Reykjavik and made their way north to Husavik, hiring pack horses for the final stage of the journey and adding an edge of excitement by using only a primitive compass for navigation, perhaps as a gesture in the general direction of the simple life they had come to find. They were lent the school at Husavik and used it as a studio, it being the time of year when all pupils were required out in the fields to make hay during the short summer.
Two quite distinct kinds of paintings and drawings were the result. In the first place Underwood took care to record the landscape and faces of the people in exactly the way that he had done at Ashurst. The colour was getting richer, more soaked, but the exquisite little study of farmland with haycocks near Husavik is a direct equivalent of the small weald landscapes, and the portraits he painted of some of the school children are related to the studies of hop-pickers and Caspar and Wendy Knewstub. He got them down directly, unsentimentally and without unduly romantic overtones. Having equipped himself with this factual ammunition, however, he felt able to go a stage further. The line that was still tied tightly round the forms in Venus in Kensington Gardens began to flicker and break free into the occasional arabesque. He was no longer specific.
Again, but admittedly on a lesser scale, he set about composing a definitive statement, this time a panoramic view of Icelandic life. Again there is a frieze, and again the gestures and relationships of the figures are as important for what they actually depict as for how they are arranged. From his own experience, he knew how to dry hay and gut fish and he wished to set down this simple economy, and the techniques on which it was dependent, in his picture.
The narrative has a basis in journalism, in the same way that the purpose of the official war picture had been to show how a camouflage tree was erected, but now, instead of his brother posing in a variety of positions for all the figures, he symbolized the farmers and fishermen he watched in Husavik.
It was an unfashionable stance. Critics would have preferred him to express himself with a purely pictorial language dependent on colour and form, but instead he referred them emphatically to the subject of his picture as the source of his interest and concern. The fact that, as with Peasantry, it was cunningly composed and orchestrated must not be allowed to compromise what it was about. This time the distinction is that the figures are no longer individual portraits, like Granny Ashdown and the rest, but generalized Icelanders whose function is to demonstrate their way of life in their instinctive reflexes to the elements in the changing seasons. To this extent the canvas is broader and there are more poetic options open.
Ironically enough, Underwood had no inhibitions about borrowing southern imagery in following this idea up. The benign influence of the elements could be expressed, for instance, by a mermaid squirting milk from her breasts into the dangerously rocking boat of a fisherman, and the more he saw of the local people the more aware he became of a totally intuitive response to the business of earning a livelihood within so simple and hand-to-mouth a culture.
Mermaids must have seemed almost rational in a social and economic situation where the emotional response was not only more vivid but more useful than the intellectual one. The months of darkness, he found, turned the islanders in on themselves and into their own imaginations. Their visual tradition had frozen up and atrophied in favour of a spoken one: they were great story-tellers.
He took trouble to learn Icelandic. A man who lived in a turf-covered hut not far from the school helped him (he had published a novel the previous year in Reykjavik), and he also became friendly with the grandfather of a family called Boklin who kept the local store. The old man had learnt half-a-dozen languages from books during his many winters. To both of them he gave drawings and watched their astonished reaction. All this set Underwood thinking about communication and expression, the way in which a culture develops channels of communication in those areas of least resistance and specifically in the directions most useful to it. It was not a consideration that he saw being taken much into account in Europe in the mid-1920s despite the widespread enthusiasm for African art, and it was an aspect that he was to think over very carefully later in relation to static, or tribal, cultures as opposed to so-called developing ones.
For the present, however, he concerned himself with trying to express his inherent satisfaction in the approach to primitivism he found in Iceland. The fact that he chose to do so on the one hand by gathering data about the way of life, and on the other by making a poetic comment on it, is indicative of his state of mind; but it also suggests, much more significantly, that a part of his personality as an artist was beginning to peel off, away from the rational and analytical in the direction of a statement of belief. He had spent years as a student in acquiring a precocious and refined technique, a manner if not a style, in the full realization that it was worthless without just such a belief, and now he had found the first plain indications of a direction of his own.
With his Icelandic reaching the dizzy heights of a long narrative nursery rhyme about a little hen who planted golden wheat, exactly in the spirit of his stay, Underwood returned to London in time to reopen the Brook Green School for the autumn term. Typically, however, he did not waste the opportunity of gaining some further material in the process. Hughes-Stanton and Thomas went home on their return tickets but Underwood determined to work his way back by trawler. He managed this by getting a Faroe islander to row him out to one while it was sheltering from a storm in Akureyri and bribed the captain to take him aboard with a case of Spanish wine. Despite a rough passage and having to fulfil his undertaking to spend much of each day gutting and sorting fish, he found time to make many drawings, and added what he saw to his store of information about northerly seas that had begun with the dangerous journey back from Norway in 1914. He was almost ready to write about it."
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